Friday, March 15, 2002

Spring Break for Grownups

A regular part of the Taekwondo classes I take with my daughter is practicing methods of escape. What do you do if someone grabs you by the lapels or by the wrists, with an inside or an outside grasp? The imposing Brazilian Jujitsu master who shares the school space gave a demonstration of other escape methods awhile ago, showing off techniques that are a blend of street fighting and ballet. “In Jujitsu,” he intoned, “we do not break bones. Only joints. We love the thumb. We love the neck. . .” I must confess, this aspect of martial arts makes me queasy, though I concede its usefulness. Could I, if needed, administer a “stunning blow” and then remember the tricky ways to twist and turn and jab my elbows so that I could make a clean getaway? Would my aversion to violence pale in the face of a powerful desire to escape?

That desire to escape—to escape almost anything—is pretty powerful right now for a lot of us, I know, when we’re all so tired of this fickle weather that New Englanders rightly call “Mud Season.” It seems crazy that only students get a one-week break from it all. I’ve acquired an adolescent attitude about it lately, muttering, like a 1950s B-movie star, “What am I rebelling against? Whatta ya got?” Many of the college students in my classes, rebelling against the torture of higher education, escaped this week to Florida or Jamaica or Mexico. What is left for grown ups in the spring? Spring cleaning. Oh, thank you very much – nothing makes me feel more like I’ve had a vacation than a good, hard stint of house cleaning.

So, instead of cleaning, I’ve escaped into books this week, remembering how powerfully novels, in particular, can remove us from our present anxieties and troubles. Based on recommendations from my students, I’ve dug into the Philip Pullman trilogy, “His Dark Materials” starting with The Golden Compass. Thanks to Pullman, I finally get the appeal of science fiction, after all my years of mocking the dialogue on Star Trek reruns while my husband sighed and patiently tolerated me. I’ve also remembered how much I relied on reading as an adolescent, when I buried myself in long novels to escape the usual anxieties of that awful age. I was a huge fan of James Michener’s fat books, and have had several gay friends reveal similar addictions to Michener as teenagers, finding in his engrossing narratives an escape from the vicious heterosexism of adolescent culture, even if the stories themselves didn’t challenge that standard. I’ve lost my taste for Michener now, but you’ve got to give the guy credit for being unafraid to pull us out of the troubling present and place us at a completely new beginning—often with one atom smashing into another, or one tectonic plate hoisting itself hornily over its neighbor. What could be better when life has us by the lapels and we long to break its joints and escape to a reinvented world?

Of course, not everyone has the same vision of escape. Recently, my husband and I mischievously spirited our children off to Chicago on a week day for the Field Museum’s astounding Cleopatra exhibit, to satisfy an obsession of our seven-year-old. After a good long time in those darkened rooms filled with earphoned grown-ups leaning over lighted glass cases to peer at shards of what my four-year-old said looked like “old trash,” her sighs grew louder. Finally, back in the main hall again, under the reassuringly interesting glare of Sue the T-rex, she said emphatically, “I felt like I was trapped in the Very Incredibly Boring Machine!” So much for escape.

Two days from now, the college students will return to my classes, many with dark tans and lightened hair and kicky cropped clothes that will be too chilly for at least another month. I am vowing not to resent them. Despite the fact that teachers often refer to Spring “Break” with invisible quotation marks because of the piles of work that hound us this week, I don’t take for granted the fact that I’ve gotten to wear my grubbies for five days, and have made progress on some of those paper piles. In place of spring cleaning, I brought dirt into our house, working luscious soil into seed trays and starting up hope for this summer’s garden in our sunny kitchen window. In the 48 hours I have left, I might even memorize some of the song lyrics on the Shrek CD that I’ve been dancing to with my daughters, if only because it will give me the opportunity to say to my students on Monday, “As an escape, I have been listening to that crazy band you kids love, Smashmouth, and like you, I am down with their radical egalitarian theory that we can all be All Stars, if we just ‘get our game on and go play.’ So—let’s get back to work, shall we?” The looks on their tanned faces should be priceless.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on March 15, 2002
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